COMPANY

Maryland University is 1st to Install Bulletproof Whiteboards

The high-tech tablet — which hangs on a hook, measures 18 by 20 inches and comes in pink, blue and green — can be used as a personal shield for professors under attack, according to the company that makes it, and as a portable writing pad in quieter times.

August 19, 2013

Calling "campus violence a reality" to prepare for, a university in Maryland announced last week that it planned to spend $60,000 on the Clark Kent of teacher supplies: an innocuous-looking whiteboard that can stop bullets.

The high-tech tablet — which hangs on a hook, measures 18 by 20 inches and comes in pink, blue and green — can be used as a personal shield for professors under attack, according to the company that makes it, and as a portable writing pad in quieter times.

"It needs to be a great whiteboard and a useful tool so that it doesn't get hidden in the closet," said maker George Tunis. His company Hardwire LLC starting out making military armor, then adapted it for the classroom after the shootings last year at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where 20 children and six adults were killed.

"When Sandy Hook happened … a light bulb went off that it's really the teachers and administrators" who need protection, said Tunis, a father of two. "Those brave souls were trying to close the gap and get to the shooter and stop him, but they didn't have anything that could stop the bullets along the way."

High-profile incidents like Sandy Hook and the 2007 mass murder of 32 people at Virginia Tech have led campuses across the country to focus on safety.

"There are several vendors that have this type of personalized armor," said S. Daniel Carter, a national campus safety advocate. "It's not something that is in much great use."

The University of Maryland Eastern Shore is the first university to adopt Hardwire's technology, though the company said it had sold bulletproof whiteboards, which cost $299 apiece, to about 100 schools in five states.